Healthy Appetites

‘Relish,’ by Lucy Knisley, and More

In "Relish," Lucy Knisley reflects on various episodes in her life, and on what she was eating at the time.

Lucy Knisley has eaten well all her life, and everything she tastes is apparently a madeleine for some happy memory. She grew up with a mother who worked for David Bouley and an uncle who ran a gourmet shop; the cover of RELISH: My Life in the Kitchen (First Second, paper, $17.99) shows her lifting an olive to her open mouth, her eyes closed in elated anticipation. It’s a memoir with only the slightest hints of conflict or struggle, apart from an early scene in which young Lucy is attacked by a flock of geese. (“I have since eaten foie gras with great enjoyment and very little guilt,” she notes.) She maps out her emotional associations with her favorite foods — Venetian croissants, sautéed mushrooms, McDonald’s fries and so on — in a breezy clear-line style, lingering over treasured moments, like resting her hand against Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” during a catering gig. Between chapters, Knisley offers simple, neatly diagrammed recipes (chocolate chip cookies! pesto! sangria!). Her language, like her drawings, is precise and uncluttered: in one of the book’s liveliest sequences, 12-year-old Lucy and a friend wander through a little Mexican town, discovering treats like “sweet corn on a stick, with hot sauce and lime, which turned the corners of our mouths red.”

Seventeen-year-old Ulli Lust’s trek across Austria and Italy in 1984 (“to accumulate as much experience as possible,” as she wrote to a friend) was considerably more fraught. She had no money and no passport — just a sleeping bag and a youthful reliance on the kindness of strangers, which was often lacking, especially when she ended up in Mafia-­controlled Palermo. Now, with the additional perspective of the intervening decades, she’s documented that trip as a sprawling, meditative graphic novel, TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE (Fantagraphics, paper, $35). In places, it’s Lust’s vehicle for exacting revenge on the jerks she encountered — especially her perpetually libidinous, shockingly callous traveling companion, Edi, and the many men whose apparent generosity always came with the expectation of sex. Still, the book ripples with exuberance: she convincingly evokes her teenage feelings of fury and joy, and the small details of the way she experienced unfamiliar places for the first time. Lust’s pen-and-ink work (augmented by the pale green tint of European paperbacks) depicts the stretched and crimped features of the people from whom she bummed change, the architecture of St. Peter’s Basilica and the chaos of a Clash concert with equally manic panache, and her line is as seemingly unkempt but as deliberately molded as her younger self’s punk-rock shock of hair.

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Trekking across Italy in Ulli Lust's "Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life."

Jeremy A. Bastian’s artwork in CURSED PIRATE GIRL (Archaia, $24.95) draws on long-lost strains of cartooning: it alludes to James Gillray’s grotesque Napoleonic caricatures and cockeyed handwriting, Arthur Rackham’s knack for stuffing his illustrations with decorative detail, and the minutely feathered textures of Al­brecht Dürer’s engravings, among other forebears. The book’s plot is little more than a set of hooks on which Bastian hangs his garlands of fairy-tale nautical imagery: a sword-wielding girl with mysterious powers searches for her pirate-captain father on “the Omerta Seas,” encountering a magical parrot named Pepper Dice, the ringletted daughter of the local governor and various unsavory seafarers. (Little is resolved in the course of this volume, which concludes with a promise of more to come.) The point, though, is not suspense but spectacle. It’s a delight to linger over Bastian’s hyper-ornate images: a pair of anthropomorphic swordfish in medieval armor battling atop a pile of seashells for an audience of goggle-eyed aquatic creatures, or a ship’s kitchen crammed with enormous knives, birds nesting in pans, intricately decorated bottles and an immense, steaming caldron.

VERY CASUAL (Koyama, paper, $15) collects perverse, funny, haunting stories by the Canadian cartoonist Michael DeForge, whose pet subject is the overwhelming creepiness of bodies. Everything and everyone in his drawings is dripping, bubbling and developing unsightly growths. He warps and dents the assured, geometrical forms of vintage newspaper strips and new wave-era graphics into oddly adorable horrors; his stories are prone to whiplash formal shifts. “All About the Spotting Deer” starts out as a dry parody of nature documentaries (“Its ‘antlers’ are actually colonies of parasitic polyps that are first attached to the deer during adolescence”); then it mutates into a vignette about an unhappy author, then into a routine about Canadian self-­celebration, and ultimately folds in on itself. The protagonist of “Incinerator” is a man whose torso appears to be a rear view of Snoopy, until a doctor tells him “we had to surgically remove the beagle part of your body,” and for the rest of the story he’s just a head on legs.

Like DeForge, Lisa Hanawalt is one of a generation of young cartoonists who are more focused on craft (and on eliciting nervous giggles) than on long-form story­telling. MY DIRTY DUMB EYES (Drawn & Quarterly, $22.95) is a zero-attention-span assemblage of surreal one-page drawings, clusters of gag cartoons (“How We Can Tell Martha Stewart’s Drunk”), short comics stories, illustrated movie reviews and garish stoner tableaus. They add up to a wildly entertaining portfolio from an artist with a masterly painting and drawing hand, obsessions with animals and genitals, and a very weird, intentionally dopey sense of humor: her review of the movie “Drive” features drawings of both Ryan Gosling and actual goslings, not to mention Andy Serkis as a chimpanzee and Hanawalt herself getting blood tests. Hanawalt can do a pretty solid impression of David Letterman-style comedy (a sample, from “The Secret Lives of Chefs”: “Mark Bittman is a vegan before 6 p.m. and a cannibal after 11 p.m.”). Her best pieces, though, are funny because they’re uncomfortable. In “Moosefingers,” an artist (with a moose head) keeps making punning sculptures of fingers and isn’t sure why. “It doesn’t matter if you feel good or bad while you make stuff,” her cat-headed boyfriend reassures her. Turning the page, we see a photograph of the sculptures, made by Hanawalt herself.

Douglas Wolk is the author of “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.” He writes frequently about comics for The Times.

A version of this review appears in print on June 2, 2013, on Page BR20 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Healthy Appetites. Today's Paper|Subscribe